THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



questioned to learn what were these facts and these 

 laws, then, to the surprise of their adversaries, the 

 Evolutionists were found to be safely entrenched in 

 their fortress of Agnosticism from which came the 

 murmur that the Truth was, "Nothing can be known." 

 Sensitive to the accusation that they were atheists and 

 materialists, they adopted, as Huxley acknowledged, 

 the terminology of materialism and denied its reality. 

 To them the great religions, and especially Christian- 

 ity, were solely the worship of an anthropomorphic 

 god and the superstitious submission to miraculous 

 events contrary to scientific facts. They failed utterly 

 to see that these are but the outer garments by which 

 were s)^mbolized the highest and holiest aspirations 

 and convictions of man. 



Nor did it ever occur to them that the "anthropo- 

 morphization" of God — the phrase is due to Fiske — 

 was exactly on the same footing as their own idolatry 

 of the materialization of the aether; if God is inex- 

 pressible by human qualities so, also, the aether is 

 equally inexpressible by material qualities. Both are 

 abstractions and both have been endowed with con- 

 crete qualities. Perhaps it is unavoidable that ardent 

 adherents to a new gospel will not appreciate the fun- 

 damental fallacies of their faith. So we may excuse 

 the Evolutionists their failure to see that science is, 

 at bottom, based on the same kind of postulates and 

 deductive reasoning as are all other kinds of know- 

 ledge. But, what is an entirely different and inexcusa- 



C 322 3 



